The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Smart Power Distribution Units (smart PDUs) may be used to provide electrical power to devices in network laboratories and data centers. For example, smart PDUs may be used to distribute power resources from one or more power busses to a plurality of devices. Sometimes, they may also be configured to provide additional functionalities such as monitoring of a power usage on a per-outlet basis or provide some power-related services to the system administrators. The term “smart” signifies that the PDU typically includes a microcontroller, firmware, or other control logic that can execute stored programs of various kinds.
Smart PDUs may be placed in stationary physical locations. Their locations are typically fixed and known. Also, since the smart PDUs are rarely moved from one location to another, they usually serve the same group of collocated devices.
Most smart PDUs require that a user manually maps devices onto power connections of the PDUs. Since the manual process is usually prone to human error, manually created mappings are often a source of errors that may be time consuming to correct.